It's Fabulous and It's Free

[Airedale1]

I was using ACD and a friend said why don't you try FastStone. Well I did and I got to tell you it is amazing. Here http://www.faststone.org/download.htm is the link.

Here is an excerpt regarding it's capabilities:

A fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more.

This program is awesome and did I mention it is free?;)

[arg245]

I've been using it almost since its beginning, and it blows the socks off of a lot of the "paid" software out there. As a simple browser and pre-viewer it can't be beat, but as I'm sure you've found, its much more than that. Reminds me of AcDSee 2.3 and lower, before it became bloatware.

Make sure you check out the "crop board" and the batch capable conversion and rename tools.

[Liveengineer]

Thanks for the Heads up Airedale1...It Rocks for a free bee

[Moppie]

Reminds me of AcDSee 2.3 and lower, before it became bloatware.




That is exactly the sort of software Iv been looking for!


Cheers Airdale, I'm going to go have a look right now.

[Moppie]

Wow!


Its fast, its light, its agile, its everything an image viewer should be.

Very cool.

[arg245]

One more tip. If you notice, Fastone also has a freeware app named MaxView. It is very similar to the regular viewer, but it lacks the editing features.

The tip is this - If you use CS2 and Bridge, you can configure Bridge to use MaxView as a viewer when you double click on a thumbnail in Bridge. It opens to a full page view immediately. When you're done, just double click the image and you go right back to Bridge. You can select the file types to open by their extension within Bridge.

May work the same for CS3 - never tried it.

[arg245]

Oh, and one more thing - slide your mouse over to the edges of the image in full screen mode - You're presented with the EXIF info on the right, navigation options on top, editing options on your left, and viewing options on the bottom.

It's full of features. You just have to find them, and when you do, it only gets better.

[philmar]

I use it to view all my processed RAWs.
My only gripe is that the open file menu in the File drop down menu. It is a pain to get the cursor there when you consider that it should not be too difficult for software to be designed to default to the open file menu when it is opened for the first time.
It could easily be designed to speed up the time it takes to find the file I want to view.

But I quibble - I use it because I can get full screen views - Picasa is easier to use and locate files with but it doesn't afford full screen views. I love both.